What Does Twitter’s New 280 Character Count Mean for Marketers?

Yesterday, Twitter announced on its blog the character count limit would increase for everyone from 140 to 280. They began testing the higher character limit and found it did not drastically alter the way people use Twitter, which is popular for its brevity.

When testing began in September, marketers naturally began to wonder how this would affect the way we talk to audiences on social media. With literally DOUBLE the text, would our message be diluted by half?

Interestingly, most people continued to tweet less than 140 characters. It is something we have gotten used to. But even if they went over 140 characters, it wasn’t by much. We just needed a little more space. So Twitter rolled out #280 across the board.

And people freaked out.

Does more copy mean more work for marketers?

No. Obviously, it almost looks like double the work to get our message through double the copy. But at the end of the day, if your content is great, people are going to read it, regardless of how much content there is out in the Twitter-verse.

Just stay focused on being a good writer and giving away information your readers are looking for.

How to be Awesome at Social Media Marketing

We read a lot of social media posts from marketing blogs, search engine optimization websites, listen to podcasts on the way to work and carefully analyze what we are writing and if it’s working. Here is what we have learned:

1. Follow best practices

Stay up-to-date on research regarding timing and number of posts. New studies come out pretty regularly, so set a reminder on your calendar to do a quick google search every few months.

Post to Twitter often, from 3 to 5 times per day, at any time of day on any day of the week

Post to LinkedIn no more than 2 or 3 times per week, ideally on a weekday. Mondays have the lowest engagement and publishing more than that hurts your social media presence.

Post to Facebook no more than 2 or 3 times per week. The same engagement dropoff observed on LinkedIn also applies to Facebook.

2. Don’t post to social media just for the sake of posting

Be respectful of the time your audience spends on social media. A newsfeed filled with random quotes that don’t benefit your business is a cheeseball way of trying to hit a "social media best practices minimum." It’s kind of like keyword stuffing. Don’t do it JUST to do it.